Connecting with Stories on the Internet

Telling Stories Online

I heard an interesting webinar today, by Dr Harlan Kilstein, about the power of telling stories as a better way of connecting with your audience than the more traditional online long sales letters we’ve grown accustomed to – and are probably bored by!

If you’re anything like me you speed-read past the mind-numbing rags to riches sales copy and just skip to the guarantee and the price tag – because you know there’s one coming!

Dr K is one of my favorite online trainers. Yes, his webinarwas promoting his “Connecting With Stories” course, but it was a lesson in itself as he used the methods he’s teaching in the course to tell us about it. (Well it would have been dumb not to have done so, and Dr K is most certainly not dumb.)

I listen to many of his webinars because they’re not hypey sales promos, they include good teaching too, and some interesting stories. Having done another of his courses, I can vouch for the quality of the content and the support. His style may not be for everyone, but in my opinion it’s far more compelling than the online hype and scarcity techniques that surely everyone can see through now.

Anyway, the lesson from the webinar was that readers are more likely to receive and trust your message if it’s conveyed as a sincere story. This isn’t about story-telling as a manipulative sales technique.

Although I haven’t signed up for his course I was very tempted by it, because in essence this is what I’m attempting to do in this blog – tell the story of taking my business onto the Internet and hope that newcomers starting an online business will avoid some of the terrible mistakes I made at the beginning. Would I do it better if I followed the course? Most certainly, but it’s not for me at the moment for personal reasons.

For the time being I shall just implement what I learned from the webinar. It’s good to feel that I’m trying to do something right, as I’m not one to sell by hype. I’d rather not sell something if I feel people are going to be disappointed. It’s not good for any long-term business prospects, and I want all of my customers to be long-term relationships.

That’s just reminded me – in my offline computerised accounting business, one of my very first customers is still with me. I programmed their system over 30 years ago (obviously with several additions along the way) and it’s still in use daily in their UK and USA businesses. They are still my best customer, in terms of income and relationship. That’s customer loyalty I’m proud of.

Anyway, back to the main point of today’s post – the story-telling course. I feel his message can be encapsulated in this quote from one of Dr K’s posts on the Warrior Forum – a mini-lesson in itself!

…. do you know what is the most-often missing ingredient in a sales message? It’s the sales message that doesn’t tell an interesting story. Storytelling . . . good storytelling . . . is a vital component of a marketing campaign. – Gary Halbert

Dr. Kilstein’s doctoral dissertation “Teacher Perceptions of Student Responsiveness To Therapeutic Metaphor” was the first successful test of using stories to enhance student learning. – Yeshiva University (1993)

That’s a serious qualification! He also has some very successful online businesses. My personal favorite being The Dogington Post – check out those followers. This is the kind of guy I want to learn from!

Hopefully we’ve all matured past the glamorous (fake) actors who were living in cardboard boxes twelve months ago but now have flashy cars, boats and mansions courtesy of Internet Marketing.

Give me Dr K’s teaching style any time. You could do a lot worse than get on his mailing list and listen to some of his webinars.

Will I be doing this course? Sadly not at the moment as I have too many complications inside my own life story right now – but I’ve book-marked it…. In the meantime, I learned a lot from his free webinar, so will implement that as best I can until life is a little emptier for me.

If anyone comes across this post who HAS done the course, I’d love to have your testimonials as comments….

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Joy

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